Just a couple decades ago, even the people at your local Stonewall Center didn't have concepts that recognized your identity. Does the LGBTQIA++ community do so now? Do you assume we've "arrived" now and know all the identities that exist?

Of course we don't. A moment's consideration of the question should tell you that. Every year there are new terms, new expressions, new explanations about gender and sexuality, so it is very much all still happening.

YOU, yes you, there, who asked "I've been thinking I was nonbinary but I was AFAB and I like to wear makeup and a skirt with lace, and I wonder if my identity is valid, what do you think?" And YOU, who administrate the Facebook group where a dozen questions like that appear every month if not every week, and always reply "Every identity is valid, you are valid, no one else gets to decide that for you". Yeah, you, too...


All those identity terms came from us. From people who had an identity that did not have a name yet, and who described how they were in detail and then put a name on it. Perhaps they linked up with others who said "Oh, you too? I never met anyone besides myself who said that. What else?", and the new term and new description got hammered out from a dialog. Perhaps they developed their statement and gave their identity a name all alone, as one voice.

All of you folks who are sorting out your identities? Please don't feel like you need to confine yourself to trying on all the existing identities until you find the one that fits.


We need your story. We need to know how it has been for you. We need to honor your experience and, if your experience makes it so that none of the existing identity-terms fits you very well, we need to understand your story and your identity, and perhaps your label for it, in order to be better prepared to understand other people like you. For the same reason that the Gay & Lesbian Centre from 1989 really needed to listen to bisexual people and transgender people and intersex people and widen their sense of who "us" is.


And about that "every identity is valid, don't worry about it" response, if I may: that's well-intentioned and warm but it can unintentionally convey the message that "oh, whatever and however you are is all fine and fabulous, so the specifics of how and who you are doesn't matter, just chill and don't fret about it".

But it does matter.

Way back in the 1970s, the people on the cutting edge of gender work were the participants in the women's liberation movement. And the people who were involved back then have said over and over again how empowering it was to have consciousness-raising groups. Where women came together and talked about how it was for them, individually. And from their discussions, from the truths that had been realized from individual people examining their own individual lives, came feminist theory, the philosophy of a movement.

Now we're the cutting edge. If we want to remain relevant, we need to continue to be a space in which individual people's experiences contribute to our understandings.

———————

You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!

My book has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.


Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page

———————

This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

One of the early reviews of GenderQueer noted that my thoughts and attitudes during my later teenage years in my book reminded her of the Nice Guys™.

It's an accurate call. When I first encountered the send-up of Nice Guys and their behaviors, I winced in recognition. Yes, I was definitely on that trajectory for awhile. The Nice Guys overtones in my book are acknowledged as intentional. In my own personal life, I didn't descend very far into blaming women, or considering the gender-polarized dating environment to be women's fault, but I had a lot of frustration and irritation; and in one important scene in the book you can see me expressing those feelings internally as resentment towards girls, and experimenting with the kind of behavior that is often advocated by so-called pickup artists.

I'm about to do something that many folks would say is ill-advised. I'm going to defend the Nice Guys (god help me). Well, sort of. I'm not about to make a positive case for being a men's rights advocate or explain why it really is all the fault of the women. But all the material about the Nice Guys describes them with eye-rolling dismissive contempt for exhibiting behaviors that we're encouraged to think of as manifestations of character flaws. I'm going to challenge you to perceive them (well, us, actually, since I'm reluctantly claiming the mantle) as people whose behaviors take place in a context, and look at the context long enough to see how it elicits those behaviors.


We are considered creepy. Creepy because we often have a hidden agenda of wanting sex. Creepy because we allegedly act nice thinking that we'll get sex as a reward for being nice. Creepy because our reasons for behaving "nice" are all about obtaining sex. Creepy because we think that by being nice, we somehow deserve sex.

So let's examine all that -- removing any gendered double standards in order to do that exam. I may be projecting my own experiences onto the Nice Guy™ debate, but it's not like there's an organized body of Nice Guys™ with a spokesperson and a position paper -- it's an identity largely created from the outside by folks who were tired of the Nice Guy shtick, and I confess that I recognize myself in a lot of the description so I may as well wear it.



a) Is it OK to want sex? Is it OK to expect or anticipate that someone would want to have sex with you?

This is a question that many a nice girl has found it necessary to contend with, so let's not dismiss it too quickly. Female people have often encountered judgmental hostility if it were thought that they wanted sex. They have often found themselves laughed at with derisive contempt connected to the idea that they did. And they've been told that if it were true, it meant they were not nice.

Now what (you may be asking) does that have to do with Nice Guys™, who, as males, would presumably not be facing those attitudes? Well, yeah, the boys are indeed sort of expected to want sex and to seek sex. But that confirms that they are Bad Boys™, not Nice Guys™.

Bad, bad, bad, bad boys
Make me feel so gooood...

-- Miami Sound Machine

Bad Boys aren't Nice Guys™. The fact that there isn't a massive social pressure on males to be Nice Guys™ instead of Bad Boys™ is particularly relevant -- somehow these particular male folks embraced an identity as Nice Guys anyhow, and overtly wanting sex isn't compatible with that. Displaying interest in sex would get the girls, the Nice Girls™, kicked out of the Nice category. Being overtly focused on the chance of sex happening is, in fact, a central part of what affirms a male person as a Bad Boy™.

That's not to say that interest in sex is entirely incompatible with Niceness, whether as manifested in Nice Girls™ or in Nice Guys™. In sitcom TV shows and romcom movies as well as in real life, we often hear the female characters complain that they'd really like to meet some guys who aren't married and aren't gay. There's no real reason for them to care whether interesting guys are single or to be concerned with their sexual orientation unless they wish to have sex take place in their lives occasionally, if you see what I mean.

But those female characters don't move around proclaiming to likely prospects that they want sex. That would not be considered Nice™.

How do the Nice Girls™ conventionally handle it? By bundling sex into a larger constellation of experiences and opting to partake of the bundle. To want a romantic relationship. To want a personal and emotional connection and within that context to be sexually active. Not otherwise.

Obviously you and I may not be at all inclined to sign on to the notion that female people should be shoehorned into this notion, this social construct that we call Nice Girls™, but you aren't unaware of the historical presence of this notion. You aren't unaware that it still has some social clout even in 2020. That even now, even after all the questionings and discardings of sexist and gender-polarized notions about how female folks should behave, a girl growing up in a randomly-selected American town is likely to have an easier time of it socially within the parameters of Nice Girl™ than she would if she were to utterly disregard it.


b) Well, is it OK to put on a "nice act" in order to get sex? Is it OK to go around thinking that because you're nice you somehow deserve sex?

I have to question the assumptions on that first one. The common derisive attitude towards Nice Guys™ accuses us of adopting a fake "nice" persona as a means of getting sex, but we are as we are -- this thing called "nice" -- despite a cultural push to be more of a Bad Boy™ and very little pressure on us as males to be Nice™ -- and we deserve the benefit of the doubt. This is who, and how, we are. We may expect things (including sex) as acknowledgment or reward for being Nice™, expectations that folks may have contempt for (and more on that shortly), but that doesn't make the "being nice" some kind of phony act.

Let's again glance across the aisle at the Nice Girls™. People don't tend to assume that they are being Nice™ in order to get sex to happen. People don't tend to assume that they are putting on a "nice act".

There is a belief about Nice Girls™ that is worth bringing up, though. They are often believed to have a high opinion of themselves, a high opinion that leads them to think and say hostile and disparaging things about boys who would rather devote their attention to considerably less-nice girls. The Nice Girls™ also may be expected to occasionally say uncomplimentary things about the not-so-nice girls themselves.

The Nice Girls™, in other words, regard themselves as a "catch", as worthy of admiration and value as potential partners. This is part of the understanding that people have of Nice Girls™, that they may tend to have this attitude about themselves.

Note that this is not characterized as them thinking that they "deserve sex". As I said before, the Nice Girls™ are taught to bundle sex along with emotional connection and think in terms of romantic relationship. So it's not that they think they "deserve sex" for being Nice Girls™, it is that they think they deserve consideration as good girlfriends for being Nice Girls™.

But as we've also already discussed, yeah, that formulation does include sex.

I think Nice Guys™ are basically doing the same thing. We tend to think we shoud be regarded as good romantic prospects. We start off putting a lot of energy into being good companions, connecting with the female people who are in our lives, thinking that sooner or later one of them will find the interactions enticing, will appreciate our value as potential boyfriend material, and if they also happen to find us physically attractive, then hey, things should progress from there, shouldn't they? It's not a materially different expectation than what the Nice Girls™ expect.

But in this gender-polarized world, we operate in a different context than they do.

Incidentally, no, I don't think we (Nice™ people of either sex) are intrinsically better than other people. It's just how we identify, how we think of ourselves and comport ourselves in the world. I'm proud of how and who I am. It's in the face of a lot of disapproval and so I don't feel apologetic about that.


c) So is it somehow OK to go moping around and getting all pissy and hostile because the girls don't appreciate your virtue as a Nice Guy™ and don't find you such a hot prospect? And WTF is with the Nice Guys™ bitterly pursuing an aggressive Pickup Artist approach and treating women like garbage while continuing to complain about things?

No it isn't OK. It isn't appropriate, it isn't politically legitimate, and, incidentally, it also isn't Nice™.

So why does it occur? I mean, look across the aisle again: the Nice Girls™ aren't doing anything equivalent to that, and I've spend the last few paragraphs comparing Nice Guys™ to Nice Girls™ to shed light on other Nice Guy™ behavior. So what's up with this bitter hostility?

We all operate in a social context, the Nice Girls™ and the Bad Boys™ and the Nice Guys™ and everyone else. There is a courtship dance established, and it has a role for the Bad Boys™ and it has a role for the Nice Girls™. The courtship dance calls for the Bad Boys™ to try to make sex happen and the Nice Girls™ to decline that and assert that they don't do that kind of thing outside of the context of an emotional connection and the prospect of an ongoing romantic relationship -- the "bundle" of which I spoke earlier -- and the dance goes on from there. They each know their lines and they anticipate the behavior of the other. But there's no courtship-dance role for the Nice Guy™. He isn't doing the Bad Boy™ dance steps that the Nice Girl™ expects and knows how to respond to. Whether she finds him physically attractive or not, whether she finds herself liking him as a person or not, whether she appreciates his personal qualities (Niceness included) or not, her own role instructions don't give her any lines or provide her with any dance steps that would make it easy for her to act on that interest if it were to occur.

Not that he, the Nice Boy™, has a clearer idea of what he should be doing. His bitter accusations are all focused on the Bad Boy™ stuff that he is not doing, Bad Boy™ stuff that the Nice Girls™ vocally complain about. He says that despite their complaints that's still where things progress, whereas affairs with the girls don't progress with a Nice Guy™ like him, and (he says) "that's unfair!"

Fair or unfair, his observations are accurate: the dance calls for the Nice Girl™ to protest the unbridled raw male expression of sexual interest as crude and demeaning and for her to assert her lack of interest in that. The dance sets them up as opponents, adversaries, with him trying to make sex happen and her disdaining that but seeing if perhaps he seriously likes her as a person and not just a sexual possibility; with him seeing if he can get past her defenses by studying her reactions and tuning into her thoughts and concerns and paying stragetic attention to her feelings. Maybe proximity and time causes him to develop real feelings for her. Maybe proximity and time causes her sexual appetite to kick into overdrive and she consents to doing more and more sexual stuff. They each have lines and dance steps and they know them. They know them the same way you know them. We all do. We've been to the movies, we've read the books, we've listened to the songs, we've heard and sometimes laughed at the jokes. Many folks dance very loosely instead of being rigidly bound to the dance steps, but the known pattern of the established dance still forms a structure.

But not for us.

Nice Guys™ are a type of gender misfit. Because Niceness is gendered and the males are the wrong sex to be embodying Nice. Nice Guys™ may not conceptualize themselves as feminine, as sissy, as trans, as nonbinary, as gender inverted people. In fact, I think they mostly don't. But in a nutshell their complaints do boil down to saying that they approached the whole sex-and-romance thing the same way girls do but that the world didn't play nice with them and left them out in the cold, with no girlfriend, no romance, no sex.

And if and when a Nice Guy™ decides to emulate the Bad Boys™ because the Bad Boys™ seem to be getting all the action he's missing out on, he may do so with contempt and hostility and bitter resentment. You want to know where else I've seen that emotional combination? Certain women who have observed "what works" with guys and have adopted the expected behaviors with scornful hate that they should have to do such demeaning and dishonest things. Yeah, hello.


———————

My book is being published by Sunstone Press, and is now available on Amazon (paperback only for the moment).

———————

This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

Home Page

“I agree! There’s no reason for all these labels! Just be who you are!” This comment was written in response to last week’s blog post, which was about retaining the authority to invent your own label instead of feeling like you have to choose from among the existing gender identities that you’ve heard about.

I feel like I’m perpetually see-sawing between these two arguments – that, on the one hand, people should not feel pressured to squeeze themselves into an identity-box if it doesn’t fit them, and yet, on the other hand, that no, that doesn’t mean labels and specifically described gender identities should be discarded.

I often get the “you don’t need labels, just be yourself” attitudes and responses, and I feel like I’m constantly explaining that I didn’t have the option to “just be myself” growing up, and while things have improved somewhat since I was a kid or a teenager, it’s still a concern – the situation has not defused yet, it’s still problematic for people coming of age. So, yes, dammit, I still see a need to draw attention to the situation, the phenomenon, the social politics of being different in this specific way, and doing so requires naming it.

I was originally going to make today’s blog post about that, and elaborate a bit on it and leave it at that, but I found myself dwelling on how I had not anticipated this “just be yourself / no labels” reply when I wrote last week’s blog post. And that, in turn, got me thinking about what replies I might get to this one. And what came to mind was someone crossing their arms argumentatively and saying “Yeah, like what? What bad shit happens to ‘people like you’ that you want to change? What horrible things happen to genderqueer sissy boys? Just what is it that you’re trying to fix?”

I could quite authentically point to physical violence and verbal abuse and ridicule. We are subjected to what most people think of as “homophobia”; one could just as viably label it “sissyphobia”. Certainly some of the violence dished out that is indeed specifically geared towards gay males because they have same-sex sexualities (for example, the Pulse shootings) but in many cases the bashers and haters have no concrete reason to harbor any beliefs or make any assumptions about who their victims prefer to fondle and frolic with; it’s “how we are”, and they assume from that “what we do”. But let’s be honest here, let’s get real and cut to the chase: the concern that make me an activist was that I was not getting laid.

(That’s an oversimplification but it works as a thumbnail summary: being sidelined and isolated from sexual interaction that others of my age and cohort were able to participate in)


And that practically qualifies as a confession. Complaining about it immediately puts me in the select company of incels, Nice Guys™, and people like Elliot Rogers and Marc Lepine. And meanwhile, there is nothing close to a social consensus that anyone has some kind of right to sexual activity per se. Which is, itself, interesting, and we should unpack that, so I will.

We do have a growing consensus that if you do things in order to satisfy your sexual urges and inclinations, it is oppressive for society to try to stamp out those venues or interfere in those behaviors, as long as they are consensual and involve adults of sound mind. Stonewall. ‘Nuff said, right? But if it isn’t a behavior for which you’re being selected and subjected to reprisals, you’re just whining if you complain that sex is not available to you. It could be that no one wants to do you because you’ve got the personality of a doorknob or the appeal of splattered roadkill; it could be your stinky underarms or your deplorable fashion sense or that perennial favorite, your failure to do what you gotta do, your failure to step up and go out there and make an effort to get what you want.

To get under a sheltering umbrella of attitudes that support the notion that perhaps it is oppressive to be denied opportunity, I’m going to borrow from the disability rights movement. It’s not a perspective that says “each citizen is guaranteed a sex life”, but it does take the stance that no barriers should interfere, including the passive barrier of simply failing to provide mechanisms that a marginalized population needs but which aren’t needed by other people -- that a reasonable degree of social facilitation is necessary and appropriate.

Sissy males who are attracted to female people are not heterosexual simply because they are male people attracted to female people. Heterosexuality is composed of roles and rules, a courtship dance with specifically gendered parts to play in the pageant, and the part written for the male participant is based on a set of assumed characteristics (including personality, priorities, goals, and behavioral nuances and patterns) that are not at all a good match for being a sissy. The assumption that is tied to us, that we must be gay fellows, is really based on the notion that a person like us could not participate in heterosexuality, that we’re not right for the part. That’s a barrier. Or, rather, both of those things are a barrier – the fact that we’re not right for the part and the fact that we are assumed not to be playing.

I have learned things that no one taught me, things that were not shown to me in movies or described to me in romance novels. I have felt good and sexy and lithe in my body, in its shape, in the way that I move. As a potential object of desire, as an attractive target. I have learned nuances of voice and gesture and the parts of speech that enable a person to indicate that they know of the possibility that you’re looking upon them in that fashion, and which let them play with that without being overt, predatory, forward, centered on their own appetite… i.e. without being masculine. Does it work the same way when a male person uses this traditionally female language in communication with a female person? Well, not often (I won’t lie) but better than any other tactic that was at my disposal. It may or may not be sexually provocative in exactly the same way so much as it speaks a message that the recipient is able to parse and recognize, and, having recognized it, to realize the implications. Or maybe I’m smokin’ hot (I could live with that).

I've been in relationships that started from there. They were different; I wasn't defined within them as "the boy". It is not that avoiding the appetite-symbol sexual initiator role guarantees you won't be cast as "the boy" for other reasons or in other ways, or that if you reach or kiss or make a pass first you don't get to have this, but it makes a good filter and it gets things started on the left foot.

The point is, I learned it in utter ignorance, tested it with no role model to emulate, and projected an identity by using it that had no name and no social identity that would enable any of the people I encountered to recognize me, to say “Oh, I get it, I’m dealing with one of those”, so their response was dependent on intuiting what it could possibly mean and what an appropriate response just might consist of.

Having to figure it all out in total darkness is quite a barrier. Having to expect my potential partners to do the same is definitely a barrier.

The label is important and necessary to draw attention to the situation; drawing attention to us, and what it is like to be us and how things work for us, is the intended fix.

———————

This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

This song could get me in trouble.



I've occasionally mentioned that at the time I was coming to the realization of my gender identity, and outed myself on campus and to the world (to the extent that I could), I was a music major at the University of New Mexico, hoping to hone my skills as a composer, songwriter, pianist, and singer.

There I was, wanting to explain being a gender invert, wanting to educate the world, wanting to communicate. So, with music among my available tools, I started writing songs about it.

This song is straight out of the blues tradition, a howl, or a whine if you prefer, bewailing what it's like to be male, femme, and attracted to women.

It's an easy target for accusations of insensitive and unwoke political incorrectness: the singer apparently wants to be congratulated for not treating women as sex objects like so many other males do (yeesh, like according women the minimal courtesy of treating them as humans instead of sex toys should win him some kind of prize?), while using objectifying language about female anatomy to do so (yeah, folks, content warning), and he dares to criticize women for reacting to male people in general based on the behavior of males as a class, as if that were somehow unreasonable.

Yeah, well that's a big part of why singing songs about it isn't the ideal mechanism. Too much of this gender situation requires careful and precisely nuanced explanation. I soon realized I needed to write about this, that I was best off depending on my skills as a writer.

I am, of course, well aware that the behaviors of both women and men are structured by the social situation, that none of us behave in a vaccuum but instead face penalties for behaviors that depart from the imposed pattern. I am, of course, complaining about those same kinds of patterns as they get imposed on male people, the whole gender polarization thing.

It's hard to express complex political analysis within the lyrics to a song.

But the blues are not about justifying the reasons for having the blues. The blues are about howling, saying that this is how it feels. And that's something people should know. Analyses of who is entitled to feel this or think that, or theories about blame and causality and so on certainly have their place, but if you want to understand social phenomena, you need to get a sense of how the people in various identities and social locations feel.


Without further ado... Another One © Allan Hunter 1981



———————

This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

On an authors' message board someone started a thread asking if we authors were perhaps an arrogant lot.

I replied,

Damn right I'm arrogant. I have a story to tell. I'd prefer that folks fork over the cover price and voluntarily submit themselves to my thoroughly entertaining written word, but I would strongly consider chaining each and every member of my species to a convenient chair and prying their eyelids open with toothpicks and reading it out loud to them. I haven't worked out the logistics of that yet but morally and intellectually I have no intervening compunctions. (You have been forewarned). Hmm, now if I just went after the literary agents, maybe...

Before long, another author answered that with

Yeah..... admirable confidence. I can't help but want to applaud it.

But... nah... we don't all deserve to be read. We are not entitled. I hope you understand. We all have our causes.

Now, my instinctive initial reaction to that is to respond that this isn't about being an author, an artist, a creative person wanting to share an artistic work; it's about being a marginalized mistreated person, a victim of a systemic wrong that needs to be righted, and that yes, dammit it is too my right to speak and to insist that I be heard. The ethics of social justice says I have the right to rise up and do what I must. And so forth.

But like so many other things, that, too, is an oversimplification. And because indulging in that oversimplification really is a bit arrogant, it's appropriate and occasionally necessary to embrace a little self-doubt now and then. Come along with me, if you will...

* Authority — There's a built-in claim in my social justice assertions, that the way I see things is damned well the way things actually are. That sissy femme males are unjustly treated by society in general, that it does make sense to think of us (or to think of ourselves) in the specific manner that I'm advocating, as differently gendered people who aren't wrong or inferior, that society as a whole becomes better in its entirety if it changes so as to accommodate our existence and begin accepting us on our own terms, and so forth. Well, yeah, I do think exactly that, I do believe those things. But there are plenty of people who think otherwise. Some of them think that the things I'm making a big deal about are no big deal. Some of them think I'm as silly and my arguments as useless as someone screaming that gravity is unfair and should be repealed because skinned knees hurt. Some of them question the authenticity of my conscious motives ("You're trying to jump onto the LGBTQ bandwagon because you're a boring white hetero cis male who desperately wants to be edgy") or the coherence of my mind ("You admit you were diagnosed with a mental illness for spouting this stuff so pardon me if I don't take you seriously"). From what source other than unadorned arrogance does someone like me derive the confidence that right is on my side?

* Objective Meaning — Then there's the bandying about of these aggregate terms and the assignment to them of social meaning and significance, as if they existed and have always existed objectively, just like I describe them, whether people at any given time recognized them that way or not. The notion that in human society there exists a bunch of male people who are essentially girls, who have the same gender polarity as the girls have, and that this category exists independent of physical sex or from sexual orientation, and that I'm shining my spotlight on this phenomenon so that everyone will see it and realize it and recognize us and start thinking of us in a different manner. Yeah, so what's wrong with that? I mean, yes, that's exactly what I've been saying. What's wrong with it is that it assumes that human experiences have a meaning in and of themselves. And that isn't true. Human experiences have meaning to someone or else they don't have that meaning at all. Meaning in general is "to an observer", not divorced from interaction and embedded in things apart from people. And that is all the more important, as philosophical truths go, when the subject matter is our own human experience. If there are no sissy femme male people who think of ourselves as being of girlish gender yet male of physical body, then it isn't that we exist but think of ourselves wrongly or inaccurately, is it, so much as we don't exist as described in the first place?

You probably suspect that I have an answer to that. That I'm not really engaging in a bunch of self-doubt and purpose-questioning, and that I'm actually tossing all that out there in order to pontificate intellectually?

Of course I am. Wait, no I'm not. Um, well... the self-doubt is real, and questioning my arrogant self is genuinely important. But no, I'm not paralyzed by self-doubt and derailed from being able to continue. I said certain things were an oversimplification. I didn't say they were fundamentally wrong. Oversimplifications tend to contain quite a bit of truth. I think these do. That's why I continue to embrace them and behave as if they were entirely the truth (most of the time). Sometimes a simplified understanding of something is more useful than the fully accurate version. Earlier tonight I drove to and from the village of Huntington, behaving as if I were on the surface of a more or less flat and motionless terrain. I know the earth is round and is plummeting around the sun as well as spinning around its own axis, but it's just easier to drive when I bracket that stuff off as irrelevant to what I'm doing. You get what I'm saying?

So here's a somewhat less oversimplified notion of the social activism thing:

* How people think of themselves and their experience and identity is not limited to concepts that they could put into words and stick labels onto. Most people, at some point in their lives, recognize themselves in a description that they hear. Prior to hearing that description, they might not have thought of themselves in quite those terms, or seen the same connections, but the fact that they do recognize themselves in the description means that it resonates with what they understand about themselves emotionally or connects up a lot of little pieces that they understand about themselves cognitively. So there's no need to make it an either/or proposition. Yes, meaning is "to a subject", especially the meaning of human experiences themselves, but meaning is not the same as a specific verbal description.

* Verbal description is an art, not a precision science. There is not an exact set of verbal terms lying in a box, each one corresponding to a specific human experience. So none of the attempts to explain human experience are "objectively correct" but all of them echo something truthful and accurate, and the better ones resonate with people as truly significant expressions of what our lives are like.

* It is still arrogant to be so insistent about expressing my verbal description on the theory that it will, in fact, resonate with people. That it will shed light on the human condition, that it can change things. Arrogance is a form of being pushy, less than fully delicate with other people's sensitivities and perhaps their disinterest in considering a set of ideas that seem foreign and strange to them. I have often described my coming out to myself in 1980 as an act of permanently losing my temper about the whole gender situation. I act fueled by anger, by a constant glowing rage that makes me willing and able to be pushy in that fashion. That a marginalized and ostracized person would feel and react with anger and stand up for herself is predictable and natural. And socially healthy. It's not practical for me to chain people to their chairs and force-feed them my thoughts, so the social world surrounding me is not at risk from my anger — I can't attain my objectives coercively whether I'm arrogant enough to consider myself entitled to do so or not. And that's true of others in my position, specifically or generally.

As a practical matter, our fury reconciles as determination. Or stubbornness if you prefer.

The arrogance is something you're just going to have to live with.

———————

This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

I've been blogging since 2014, but starting last spring, I began doing something a bit different: I started echoing these blog posts on a high-traffic fast-moving general-purpose message board.

To put things into perspective, here on LiveJournal a given post will sometimes get a comment, maybe even two; on its DreamWidth clone, a couple of comments were entered during the year; on Facebook, where I post links to the blog on several gender-related groups, I'd get a couple "likes" and an occasional comment as well; meanwhile, on the Straight Dope Message Board, copies of these same blog posts generated 415 replies during one week, 279 on another, with people interacting with each other as well as with me and my own replies to their comments and so forth — a full-blown conversation.

Well... I have always thought that if I had people's attention for long enough, I'd make sense to them, they'd get it. That even if some people took an adversarial stance or became dismissive of me and what I was saying, I would be making sense to enough people that I'd have supporters, and that the overall weight of public opinion would have my back.

And, well... it didn't work out that way.


The first post in the series that I reposted to the Straight Dope was Regarding Matters Psychiatric, which delved into what happened in the spring of 1980 in the weeks and months after I first came out: some people on campus found me disturbing and unsettling, they couldn't make sense of the things I was saying with such fervor and intensity, and they began to wonder about my state of mind — perhaps in part because I was obsessing so much about sex and sex-related matters, which are considered personal and somewhat weird to talk to people about, perhaps in part because I was behaving as if I was onto something of earth-shattering, game-changing importance, but probably mostly because people who are this excited and passionate about some set of ideas have usually acquired those ideas from some religion or cult or other font of ideology, but I had apparently made mine up on my own.

So I suppose it is fitting in a way that I have just finished a year trying to make sense to the folks at the Straight Dope, being intensely focused on the things I wanted to explain to them and discuss with them, mixing my own home-brewed gender theory with anecdotes from my personal life and, as the months ticked by, leaving them more and more with the impression that here amongst them was someone who was very self-immersed, very obsessed with a bunch of ideas that didn't make much sense to them, someone who was impervious to their attempts to get me to realize that this stuff either doesn't matter or isn't anywhere near as important as I act like it is... in short, someone disturbing and unsettling who kept posting things they couldn't make much sense of, someone who struck them as not being in a very stable and balanced state of mind.


Well... I've always been out, on the message board, as a psychiatric patients' rights advocate and activist against psychiatric oppression. There have been times when there have been debates about forced treatment and patients' rights and a few people have said I was too coherent to be a real psychotic:

When I first read your posts on this subject it took me a while to realize that I fell into a "True Scotsman" fallacy about you: No true schizophrenic could be so functional, rational and lucid, therefore you could not be a true schizophrenic.

So, on the bright side of things, I guess the people of the Straight Dope now have a more direct and personal experience of how it might be possible that someone like me, who is not a danger to anyone and who merely has some strongly held odd ideas, might be experienced as someone whose mental status comes into question, even to the point that school authorities request that he be put on a locked ward for evaluation. Yeah, deja vu all around: this is pretty much how it went down in 1980. (Except that having a lot of cyberspace between me and the denizens of the Dope seem to have ameliorated any sense of compelling in loco parentis type responsibility).


On the less bright side, it's very frustrating and rather demoralizing. I tend to think I write well. That I express myself in words quite skillfully and can make some very complex concepts materialize in verbal form. Maybe instead I write with great opacity, making sense mostly only to myself.

And of course I'm trying to get a book published. Let's not forget that. The book isn't written as a work of gender theory (fortunately), and I like to think it is written in language that is a hell of a lot less off-putting. Still, the bottom line is that I wrote it with the confidence that if I had people's attention for that amount of time I would make sense to them, I could show them how it was and they would get it, and yet that's also what I expected of my blog posts... so you can see how this is kind of worrisome, yes?


The replies I got over the course of the year gradually escalated in hostility, contemptuous dismissal, and in their frustration with me. The Readers' Digest Condensed Version of their reaction to me was that, while they understand transgender people, I wasn't trans, since I was not at odds with the body in which I was born, and therefore I should get the fuck over it, I wasn't much different from many other male people who also weren't John Wayne or the Marlboro cowboy. And that, furthermore, I was the one going around stating that men in general have chacteristics A, B, and C, which others observed and I myself observed were characteristics that I lacked, while women in general had characteristics D, E, and F, which both I and other people observed that I did have — and by making such statements and observations, I was the sexist one mired in traditional gender assumptions and beliefs.

I think many of them found it frustrating that after they had pointed this out, I kept on doing it. I was being stubborn, dense, and it was annoying to them: they'd pointed out the error of my ways, and although they outnumbered me I wasn't taking their word for it! We've all told him, over and over, how many times do we have to tell him? Yeesh, he's thick as a brick!


Is there any less humiliating spin or interpretation I can put on their reception to my ideas and my attempt to express them? Well... yeah, actually, although in my position I need to be cautious about embracing the explanations that make me feel good, if you see what I mean... anyone in my situation should seriously consider that maybe they're not saying important meaningful things that make sense after all. But having said that...

• Things that I say seem crazy to people sometimes because they don't already understand it. To state the almost ridiculously obvious, it is easier to understand something you've already listened to and understood in a slightly different form before than to understand something that's more completely new.

• Add to that the fact that I'm one individual person, and we don't actually tend to take individual people's thinking seriously. It's as if folks secretly believe that all ideas actually come from outside of people's heads. Last week's blog post, in fact, was in part about the audacity of saying "we" to refer to a not-yet-established social identity. I've also spoken on occasion about socially liberal modern culturally aware people who behave as if they had been issued a little paper score card listing all the marginalized outgroups they need to care about.

• Meanwhile, gender and sexuality are areas of powerful emotional content for all of us; we all tend to have a degree of emotional investment in the models of such things that we hold in our own minds. And, as Elizabeth Janeway once said,

[T]oday's facts are embedded in today's situation. We accept them as being self-evidently true, as signifying what they are; or at least, we try to. We are unhappy with puzzles and ambiguities, uneasy with shifting roles and mysterious behavior. Why?

Because they demand something from us. Present events act on us and call for action by us. Since we can change them, not simply define or describe them, they acquire a moral presence. They pose a question of responsibility, and by doing so they change the way we look at them.

Well... (I apparently like to write "well..." a lot)... anyway, yes, I have found all this disconcerting and worrisome, and yet my ideas still make sense to me, including the idea that this stuff is important and is worth expending the time and energy trying to put it out there. So despite doubts and insecurities about it, I am, on balance, inclined to continue doing what I've been doing.


————————

I am now echoed on DreamWidth, like many other LJ folks. My DW acct is here. Please friend/link me on DW if you are a DreamWidth user.

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

In my last two blog posts, I described my life between high school and the end of my first semester of giving college a second try. I'd started out pretty optimistic that I wasn't so different from everyone (or that I was, but that it didn't matter any more, that I would find my niche). I was confident at first that I would find an expression of masculinity that worked for me, that fit me and suited me and also provided me access to dating and the probability of girlfriends.

That didn't happen. I tried the blue-collar affirmative self-determination model as an auto mechanic but didn't fit in with the other guys, seldom met women, and couldn't support myself adequately. Then I retried college but found that the lightweight bantering of flirting was embedded with sexist assumptions and gender-specific roles that definitely did not fit me, and although people were less hostile and more accepting on campus than in mechanics' garages, they thought I needed to work on self-acceptance — that I needed to come out.

If things had been working out for me, I don't think other folks' opinions would have had much bite, but they weren't. The world might have guys like me in it who had girlfriends to love them, who had active and fulfilling sex lives, but I was still a virgin at 21 despite having sought and pined for a romantic relationship since I was 10 or so, and I spent a lot of my time feeling pathetic, a miserable failure in the way that mattered the most to me personally.

In fall of '79 I picked up one of those self-help growth and actualization workbooks from the UNM student bookstore, and one of the quizzes in it was about how much you matched up with gender expectations for your gender, and doing that quiz had really electrified me, startled me. It's not that I had never noticed or thought of myself as being more like the girls than I was like the other boys, but now I was seeing it in the context of being upset and frustrated about the dismal state of my romantic and sexual life, and whereas before it was just one difference among many, all of a sudden it looked like an explanation. Or a restatement of the problem. So with that in my head, the well-intentioned encouragement to "come out" added gasoline to the fire burning in my head: what was I? What did it mean, what were the implications for ever getting to have a girlfriend, what did all this make me? Was I gay and somehow didn't know it? Or, dear god, maybe it was less about what I wanted and more about the way I was, feminine instead of masculine, making me heterosexually ineligible??

Yeah, that was the big fear, really. I did not want to change and become more masculine. I'd rather be dead, frankly. I didn't want to spend my life never having a girlfriend and a sex life either.

Something clicked into place between December 1979 and February 1980. I finally lost my temper about the situation and stepped out to confront it. I realized women didn't come rolling out of a factory, identically produced and identically wired to only respond to conventionally masculine men who fulfilled conventionally masculine expectations in dating and flirting behavior — there would be women who found the generalizations and expectations no better a fit for them than they were for me. And hey, that was a big part of feminism! I was essentially rejecting patriarchal sexist stuff for myself on a personal level in a way that mirrored what radical feminists were saying and doing!

I came out in Spring of 1980. I didn't have terminology to express it (which is still a problem) and I wasn't entirely consistent in what terms I did use, but the phrase I used most often was "heterosexual sissy". I also used phrases like "straightbackwards people", "contramasculine", "diminutive-docile" as opposed to "dominant-aggressive", and a few other things.

Anyway, I also kept a scrapbook. I considered myself to be doing something important, something political, something radical. I was coming out of the closet.

SISSY SPRING SCRAPBOOK

These first two were continuations of the self help workbook quiz. I kept jotting down additional observations about myself and the ways in which I was more like one of the girls than one of the boys. (Some of those observations were pretty contrived and more than a couple are statements I would not make about myself, but never mind that). I was examining the idea: is this real, is this centrally true about myself? It is, isn't it?





These two are self-portraits from the first semester of college. Both of them reflect a feeling that I was walking through life as a cheerful zombie and trying to smile on the outside while I was cut off and miserable on the inside.





I used to draw with colored pencils especially when I was tripping acid. I had this one on my wall for awhile in Fall 1979. One of my roommate's friends said he knew what I was aiming for with this picture, that it represented a limp-wristed mincing prance with a Rockettes kick (he mimicked that posture to illustrate), and he winked and nodded his approval. I never knew how serious people were and whether they were being snarky and hostile and when they were being liberal and accepting, and I wasn't always sure how much of it was just in my own mind, but there were enough occurrences to populate all three of those categories with many such events.



When I started the scrapbook, I wrote directly into it, designing a title page and a statement of purpose:





Several pages in, I designed "the Questionnaire". I was trying to put down on paper a sort of questionnaire that I felt like the world had been administering to me in various ways my entire life, and I was making it explicit.

In the first panel, the question is whether or not you fit in as a typical guy, with conventionally masculine characteristics. People who answer "yes" don't get additional questions but anyone answering "no" would be receiving follow-up questions. I created an "option 2" ("you getting any?") as a way of saying that if your sexual and romantic life is working out to your satisfaction anyway, you need not be concerned about your masculinity or lack thereof and don't need to face any further questions —



Option 3 was the most common next question you get to face if you are male, not conventionally masculine, and if, no, things are not exactly working out for you (with the women) anyway: gay? If yes, you've arrived at your identity, but if not, you get to move on to some further questions...



Option 4 is basically the "There's something wrong with your head" possibility. It may not seem like an "identity" but it felt to me that it kept being offered as a way to think of myself, given the irreconcilable situation and the intensity of my feelings and increasingly obsessive nature of my thoughts on the matter.



Option 5 is even darker...



... and Option 6, the one I'd found for myself only after exhausting all the previous ones, was what this scrapbook was all about:



You'll notice:

• I had not as of yet contemplated the possibility that I was transsexual. I did shortly after this point. The word in 1980 was definitely "transsexual", not "transgender" and it specifically meant going the sex reassignment surgery route, it's what people did if they were transsexual. I became quite excited about that for awhile but because I was attracted to women it was not so obvious to me that I should pursue this. Transition to female in order to be a lesbian? Well, I could (even though, in 1980, I had never heard of anyone doing such a thing). But what lesbian would want to be with a woman who had once been a male? (Jan Raymond had just published The Transsexual Empire, an exclusionary feminist declaration of war against male to female transsexuals. Widespread lesbian acceptance of transsexual lesbians didn't seem too likely to me). I still could have, but with this many impediments to consider, I asked the most pertinent question: Do I dislike my body, in and of itself? Do I feel a need to have female parts, does this body feel wrong? And I realized that no, it wasn't about the body, not for me.

• No mention of being bisexual either. It didn't solve anything as an option. Calling myself bisexual wasn't going to conjure up girlfriends, and I didn't have any interest in sex with male people, and so it just didn't seem relevant.


Among my Spring 1980 courses was a poetry course. We were asked to write a poem about what we'd like as an epitaph or how we'd like to be remembered after we were gone. I wrote this one, drawing on how I'd felt the previous semester when I'd been haunted by all these questions and feeling so unknowable and lost —



This next snippet was scribbled in the margins of the scrapbook. I really saw this as a fundamental new identity I was embracing for myself, and it incorporated a vision for a different approach altogether to the matter of sex and romance with women. I was going to pursue it from now on as one of them, as an absolute equal with no tolerance for different expectations and roles based on gender. And I was going to find someone with whom that particular option was going to click.



I placed this personal ad in the Albuquerque Journal, as sort of a combination of personal ad and political call-to-action:





————————

I am now echoed on DreamWidth, like many other LJ folks. My DW acct is here. Please friend/link me on DW if you are a DreamWidth user.

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

Los Alamos NM is where the first third of my story takes place, covering the critical years of puberty and adolescence when questions of gender and sexual orientation emerge from a person's negotiations towards adult sexual expression.


This weekend, my high school held its 40th reunion. I had not been back to Los Alamos since my parents retired and moved elsewhere, and I hadn't been to a reunion since the 10th in 1987; so from a combination of nostalgia, a desire to see some people I hadn't seen in eons, and an opportunistic interest in promoting my book to people who were there for the events portrayed in Part One, I opted in for this one and made the journey.



I made arrangements to have an author's table to receive interested visitors and discuss gender issues, growing up genderqueer in Los Alamos, and my forthcoming book specifically, to sign folks up to be alerted when it becomes available for order. And I posted to various relevant Facebook groups so the class of 77 knew about the book and were invited to drop in at the author's table.

My girlfriend A1 (one of my partners) flew out with me to Albuquerque and we hopped into a rental car. I think I would have managed the journey using the dusty rusty memories of making the drive back in the day, but I was glad to have our GPS along. Northern New Mexico, and the Jemez Mountains in particular, are still heartbreakingly beautiful. Our rental economy car chugged and gasped its way up the road, desperately trying to burn gasoline at 7200 feet; we weren't doing a whole lot better ourselves, with our six-decades-old, sea-level-acclimated lungs and hearts. I rejoiced in the dryness, mostly, but my lips and my nose were dissenters, chapping up and otherwise protesting the lack of moisture.



• There was an interestingly varied reaction on the part of my former schoolmates to my coming out + book project, but by an overwhelming margin the most common reaction was supportive and congratulatory. People said "you are doing a good thing" or "thank you for this" or "I thought I was the only person who was a gender or orientation minority in Los Alamos, no one talked about it back then". People said "I remember you and I always thought you were very brave. You were your own person and you stood up for yourself". People said "Congratulations! When is it coming out? Can I order it yet? Oh, I'm definitely going to buy a copy, I'm looking forward to reading your book".

• I received one heartfelt apology in private from someone who remembered having participated in harassing me back in the day. He said that looking back on it he viewed his behavior at the time as ignorant and hateful. I found the gesture healing and I did my best to extend the same to him, noting that I hadn't been very tolerant of masculine boys and their ways and behaviors either, at the time, and my own hostility and judgmental attitude didn't make me an entirely innocent victim.

• Another person recalled a specific incident from back in 8th grade at Cumbres Junior High: "I had a squirt gun and I came up to you in the cafeteria and squirted you in the face. You just sat there and didn't react and I wanted a reaction so I kept on squirting you. And after a moment you got up and broke your cafeteria lunch tray over the top of my head." I remembered the incident well -- I think it was a rather famous incident, in fact, as my neighbor told me when reminiscing a couple years later: "Some people even saved fragments of that lunch tray as souvenirs". Anyway, I explained to the guy that by the time of the squirt-gun incident I had been bullied and harassed so often that my reactions were pretty shut down, but when I did react it was all out of proportion because it wasn't about him, it was about the whole ongoing phenomenon, and because he wasn't stopping. We shook hands, and later he came over to hang out at our table. I hadn't included that event in the final version of the book but now I'm thinking I should reinsert it: it's a good example of the way in which all the advice to "not let them see that they're getting to you" started to show up as me not reacting when things like this happened.

• Perhaps understandably, the event organizers weren't 100% comfortable with the prospect of a bullying victim returning to the scene and attending an event that would also be attended by some of the participants in my erstwhile victimization. One person wrote, "Please consider that our committee has worked really hard to try to make this a fun reunion, and conjuring up bad feelings about high school or junior high events that were unpleasant puts our efforts in jeopardy." I had to grin to myself at the image it conjured up, of me returning to settle up 40-45 year old scores as my fellow alumni backed away in horror. "Don't worry", I said (reassuringly, I hope), "I'm not going to descend like Maleficent to point my bony finger at people and curse the proceedings. Like everyone else, I'm looking forward to seeing people I haven't seen in years; this isn't a vengeance and retribution visit, I promise!"

• People did ask me about the book, not merely at the author's table but as they came by and (re)introduced themselves. "So I hear you wrote a book?" One couple asked enough questions to get me started (hey, it doesn't take much to get the author of an autobiographical account to start talking about themselves, we're admittedly rather self-immersed); in as abbreviated and encapsulated form as I could, I summarized an early life in which I'd identified with the girls and made efforts to not be seen as one of the boys, and had protected myself from hostility and harassment by being a teacher's pet and embracing adult protection; then had come to Los Alamos in 8th grade just around the age that hormones were kicking in, and as it turned out I was attracted to the girls. "So the book really revolves around the question of how to negotiate sexual relationships with girls when I had modeled myself as someone just like them, a girlish person myself". The guy half of the couple didn't really get it: "So... would you say you're more gay, then?" Well, there's a reason I wrote a full-sized book, a representative memoir. It doesn't encapsulate easily into a quick overview that everyone can follow. In our society we see and interpret things through the lens of how we understand the world, and the world does not have an understanding of how a male person can be a feminine and yet function as a heterosexual person, a male person who would have sexual experiences with female people -- any more than I myself did.

• A majority of the people who expressed interest in the book did so in passing rather than at the author's table I'd booked, so I did not harvest their email addresses. In a separate post to the various FaceBook groups I will invite them to send me their email address and that way I can let them know when the book becomes available and include a direct link to where they can place an order for it.

————————

I am now echoed on DreamWidth, like many other LJ folks. My DW acct is here. Please friend/link me on DW if you are a DreamWidth user.

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

June is Pride Month!

So, in one of the LGBTQIA-centric Facebook groups I participate in, someone posted a link to a pride month calendar -- similar to this one -- and because it was June 2 at the time, said "Happy Lesbian Pride Day".

It wasn't terribly long before someone said in reply, "Why do we have to have all these separate days for specific categories of people? That's silly! Pride Month should be about us coming together as a community and it should focus on our solidarity and diversity and how coming together empowers us. It shouldn't be about dividing up the calendar so each little unique identity gets its own separate day!"

That, of course, is practically an echo of what mainstream straight folks often say about us, our activism, and Pride Marches and Pride Month altogether: "Can't you just be a person, can't we all just be people together, can't you rejoice in your own unique individual identity instead of needing to label yourself and making a big deal about your labeled difference? Why does everyone have to be doing identity politics, anyway, it's so divisive!"

And of course, the moment I point out that this kind of comment IS, in fact, reminiscent of what mainstream straight people say about Pride and etc in general, there's going to be some people, like those white well-dressed gay guys over there, see them? They're wincing because they're expecting me to say "Check your privilege" and start comparing them to cisgender white males or something. And to say that the less socially visible parts of the LGBTQIA spectrum, like intersex people and genderqueer people (and definitely nontransitioning gender inverts like me), benefit from a little special attention if our identity is prominently noted on one of those calendar days (my specific one isn't, by the way). Which I am (or, rather, I just did).

But relax, be at ease. I'm not winding up to blast anyone for not being sufficiently oppressed and marginalized enough to get off the blame-hook as being part of the problem, or to accuse anyone of keeping us more-marginalized types from escaping our silence and darkness.

I'm not choosing sides between those two positions so much as I'm putting them both out there so we can look at the sensible good points that exist in each of them.

Let's start with Gay Rights. Think about this: the people seeking gay rights basically wanted to be mainstreamed. They were tired of gay people being targeted for different treatment. They wanted to be accepted as the nice guys next door, get married if they wanted to just like anyone else can, teach in your schools and sing in your church choir and go on dates to the local movie theatre and NOT stand out as different.

But because it wasn't already like that, they had to draw attention to what they were being put through. "Look, this is how it is for us", they said. And they challenged negative perceptions of gay people, things that folks said and believed about gay people that were used as justifications for not treating them as people like any other people. "Hey, over here, look at me, I am one of the people you described that way and it isn't true. Don't be hating on me, I'm not so different from you!"

Thus, in order to make progress towards the goal of being mainstreamed and being accepted and treated as people like any other people, it was necessary to talk about the categorical difference and make a social issue of how people in that category were subjected to different treatment.

Lesbians, at some point, became vocal about not feeling very recognized or included in gay rights. "Everyone pretends like on the one hand it doesn't matter what women do with each other anyway, and on the other hand to whatever extent women-identified women are subjected to discrimination and hostility and unfair treatment, hey, getting gay rights for all gay people will fix stuff up for us too. But we have our own experiences, our own specific concerns that aren't a carbon copy of the concerns of gay males, and we're tired of being erased and ignored. We need to be included in making policy and setting goals and having our experiences described and respected too!".

So after awhile, this sunk in enough that the specifically inclusive phrase "gay and lesbian" became common.

Fast-foward by a couple decades, and we've got this ever-expanding acronym and a Pride Month calendar that's soon going to need more than one months' worth of days. The specifics aren't uninteresting or unimportant, but at the moment I want to stress the recurrent common pattern: some marginalized people came together to speak collectively about the barriers to being accepted and understood as ordinary people, and then, within that community, a subset of the participants felt that they needed to point out who they were and what they were being put through before they could really feel like this was THEIR movement and that it was giving THEM a voice, because otherwise the movement wasn't all that much about them and people like them. And then another subset followed their lead and did likewise.

If you were a bird, and you wanted to fly, you would need to beat your wings. And beating your wings means some of the time you are lowering your wings, while at other moments you are raising them upwards. It takes both motions to accomplish the beat.

We need a sense of connection, community, solidarity. We want shared identity, the sense of having an identity-in-common that bridges differences, the rejoicing of coming together in peace and joy. That's the upbeat.

We need the separate experience of our unique situations to be understood and validated. We want to be heard, to have any collective understanding include us and our individual viewpoints. We need to challenge any uniform aggregate sense of "us" that leaves our individuality excluded and our specific vantage point unseen and unheard. That's the downbeat.

Let's fly.


————————

I am now echoed on DreamWidth, like many other LJ folks. My DW acct is here. Please friend/link me on DW if you are a DreamWidth user.

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

I echo my blog posts on the Straight Dope Message Board, an internet discussion board I've been a part of for two decades. It's a general-topic board where people post thought-provoking posts on a wide range of interesting subjects. For those of you with no familiarity with it, I recommend it: The Straight Dope Message Board

Anyway, there is a current thread titled Not having sex on the first date, which in turn was prompted by author Anna Akana's YouTube video titled Should I stop f*cking on the first date. The ensuing questions concern women and whether or not they refrain from having sex on the first date (or "too soon" by some other definition) specifically in order to fend off being discarded or otherwise perceived in a negative manner by the men that they date.

The Straight Dopers' posted opinions can be conveniently (at least for me and my thought processes) divided into three rough clumps:

• posts that come from a viewpoint that regards the double standard and any relevant beliefs about built-in differences between the sexes as deplorably sexist and either express bewilderment about any modern males who would hold such sentiments or else attribute such attitudes to knuckle-dragging misogyny and express bewilderment about why women would think losing out on the prospect of such guys is any real loss;

• posts that come from a stated belief that there are indeed built-in differences between the sexes, and that the double standard exists as a very predictable outgrowth of those differences;

• posts that do NOT embrace a belief that these differences are inherently built in to male and female nature but which instead emphasize the entirely real existence of the social attitudes and accompanying expectations, and contemplate the behaviors against the backdrop of those social realities and how those behaviors are likely to be interpreted by the other party (who is also embedded in that social environment) in these liaisons.


Within the first clump, one person finds the behavior of misogynists confusing and inconsistent: they want sex, and they'd be unhappy if they were deprived of sex, and yet they're contemptuous of the women who make sex easily attainable. (I made similar points in my blogpost titled What Do Men Want? last March, so I quite understand that bewilderment). Farther down, someone opines that men with this kind of mindset think sex degrades the party who is penetrated, so they have contempt for anyone who would let themselves be so degraded.

Other folks' answers and conjectures come from a more essentialist perspective: that men and women simply want different things (men want sex, women want ongoing relationships) -- sometimes this is stated explicitly, while other people's posts seem to tacitly assume that while surmising that what a person wants on his first date is often different from what he wants over the long haul (without explaining how or why this would differ by gender to create the described situation).

Then, in the third cluster, people ponder the strategic thinking of the participants against the backdrop of these cultural-social expectations: if there are roles and rules and expectations, some people can be viewed as testing their potential partners to see how appropriate and normative their responses are. Another person picks up from there and conjectures about the thoughts in the minds of one person when the other person's behavior does NOT follow those roles and rules, the wonderings and ponderings that person would have about WHY the other person would violate those social norms in such a situation.


Nobody has, as of yet, brought up gender in the sense of being cisgender as opposed to being transgender or genderqueer and how that variable would affect these participants. I, of course, am about to do so.



I am currently combing through Part One of my book, because the publishing editor finds that section (which covers junior high and high school days) to have redundancies and would like me to trim them out. (And I agree with that assessment, by the way). So as I've gone through it paragraph by paragraph, one of the recurrent themes from that part of my life was the powerful aversion I had towards being perceived as "only after one thing".

Insofar as I had always seen myself as akin to the girls and wanted them to see me that way as well, I had also internalized a lot of the same things they did about how we wish to be perceived. And across a very wide spectrum of differences, one of the things I observed about nearly every girl I'd ever known was that NONE OF THEM WANTED TO FEEL AS IF THEY WERE PUSHING SEX ONTO SOMEONE WHO DIDN'T APPRECIATE IT. Some girls wanted to feel as if sex with them were so special and personal that it would only be a possibility under very select circumstances. Other girls were cheerfully enthusiastic about sex with any adequately cute person who was similarly enthusiastic about having sex with them. And many had an attitude all along a continuum in between. But almost no girl had any interest in trying to make sex happen with someone who found the prospect unappealing.

Firstly, because you can't feel very attractive and desirable if you're trying to impose sex on someone and they're acting as if you're insulting them or asking for a huge huge favor. Secondly, because it's humiliating to have to mount a campaign to get someone to do anything with you that should be of mutual benefit, whether it be eating together during lunch or playing jumprope together on the playground or being friends in general or whatever. Thirdly, because it's not nice to make someone do something so personal if they don't want to, and although some girls didn't have any compunction against that sort of thing, many did -- it didn't mesh well with how they like to think of themselves, they weren't mean girls who took delight in making someone creeped out and uncomfortable.


if you think of the behavior from the vantage point of the person doing it, it looks like begging for it, trying to get someone to condescend to do something with you that ought to be a mutually delightful thing if both parties want it. If you think of it from the vantage point of the person you'd be doing it to, on the other hand, it manifests itself as a nasty invasive pushy offensive kind of behavior, and if you aren't comfortable with that notion of yourself (or of being perceived by others in that way), that's not so enticing either.


I have said before that I myself am agnostic about whether or not there are intrinsic built-in differences between the sexes in matters like this. I certainly agree with the people in the third clump, as I described and defined it above, that there is definitely a social reality regardless of whether or not there is a biological reality, and the social reality means that everybody functions not in a vaccuum but against the backdrop of socially shared expectations and roles and rules, and they are definitely gendered and they definitely delegate the horny sex-seeking sexually aggressive behavior of making sex happen to the male people.

The single most recurrent question I get from skeptical and provisionally noninclusive people when I say I am genderqueer and identity as a male girl is "what do you mean when you say you're a girl if you do not wish to have a female body or to be perceived as female?" It's a long complicated convoluted answer, which is why I wrote a book about it, but this issue, the "only after one thing" issue (if we may call it that), that was critical for me. it's the keystone issue. I'm not doing all this in order to win the right to wear skirts when I feel like it. It's this.

So here are some takeaway points:

• If you want to understand why girls in general, and boys in general, behave according to these patterns, it is useful to consider the situation they would find themselves in were they to depart from them.

• If you wish to understand why genderqueer people find it important and necessary to come out and explain their gender identity to the world surrounding them, ask yourself how else would a person proceed if conforming their own sexual (and flirting and dating and related etc) behaviors to those expected patterns is so foreign and feels so wrong to them that they can't go there; and then consider what alternatives may exist and how one would seek out potential partners who do not have those expectations.

• Riffing on the line of thought of one of the Straight Dopers I dumped into the third clump category, YES, consider the thought processes of someone when they do encounter someone who does NOT behave according to the expected conventions. It is reasonable and rational, I think, to assume that the typical person would find it perplexing and worrisome -- not so much that these nonconforming behaviors are WRONG but that they're indicative of someone not caring, in a proper self-preservative manner, for what folks they encounter might think of them. But now let's consider an ATYPICAL person in the same situation and perceiving the same nonconforming behavior. An atypical person whose reaction is an affirmative one. "Aha! I found one!"



————————

I am now echoed on DreamWidth, like many other LJ folks. My DW acct is here. Please friend/link me on DW if you are a DreamWidth user.

————————

Index of all Blog Posts